Bits and Pieces 22

Posted on May 17, 2017 by ehurst

Yesterday’s heavy workout was just dynamite. I’m still having trouble with the pulled calf muscle; last week I could only jog up the hill, but yesterday I could run slowly. After last night’s heavy storms, we have serious high winds today. I don’t care to ride much when the winds are mostly over 20MPH. So today I took a long walk. There were a few older kids in the park already escaped from school this near the end of the school year, and their shenanigans kept me from stopping to enjoy the silence.

The Rise of Evangelical Feminists: We can talk about fallen nature and biblical laws against women exercising authority over men, but the real problem is the non-Christian background of Western culture in Western churches. Jesus Christ was an ancient Hebrew man; His teaching did not spawn the West. The West arose as a clear departure from the ancient gospel truth.

If Western evangelical male leaders weren’t doing such an awful job of dealing with women in the first place, their women wouldn’t feel the need to do their own thing. And we really don’t need anyone exercising authority in the blogosphere; it’s not possible in the first place. I’m not concerned with alternative voices nor opposing voices; God can handle that without me. Women do need their own time and place and their own leaders, alongside their time with the covenant community. You can bet they had their networks in the ancient Hebrew society, but their men didn’t lead as Western men do.

Please notice that Zionists and imperialists in the US are not exactly the same; this is two groups with different agendas. The Zionists have the voting block, publicity and campaign money. The imperialists use their wealth differently. Also, the imperialists realize that the economy is breaking down and would rather get it working again. The Zionists don’t give a damn; they are hoping to provoke Armageddon. When we realize that the four largest political voting blocs (globalists, imperialists, nationalists and Zionists) are forced into two major political parties, it makes no sense at all.

Lately I’ve been experiencing inexplicable disruptions in surfing the Net. I like to read the news on a few controversial sites and something disrupts the service between me and them. In all cases, the problem disappears when I use a proxy. The quickest way to do that is use Opera with “Turbo” turned on; it runs your page requests through a proxy that can help to bypass traffic congestion, for example. Using it generally speeds up page load times.

I like to shop at thrift stores. The other day I found an old copy of Lotus Smartsuite 97. It runs fine under WINE on Linux, but it’s interface is just too primitive for me to enjoy using it. I’ll be glad to pass it on to anyone who wants it. I can recall using Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS and liked it rather well. I still would love to have a disk copy of Perfect Office from versions 9-12 (Word Perfect), so if you stumble across one let me know. I’ve been told the ones that used to come with Dell computers was the easiest to work with.

God is good!

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Bits and Pieces 22

Off the Cuff 04

Posted on May 16, 2017 by ehurst

This is not about Israel so much as about the US.

Let me reiterate that this is one of those prophetic fires that you aren’t required to believe, but that I am required to put up here on the blog. And as with the rest of the series, I don’t have any specifics; this is based on an overwhelming sense of foreboding. If anything, pay attention to the way I base this on a heart-led understanding of divine justice. For now I see two primary paths for the US.

1. If we continue muddling along as we have since early last year, there will be an apocalypse on some level. The left has gone all in on their rejection of how things have turned out. It’s not that they reject the system; they reject what the system has churned out despite their cheating. (This has nothing to do with how their opponents cheat.) They didn’t get their way and they are ready to destroy the whole thing to change it back their way. They are in panic mode because they are outnumbered on the ground. Unless the right responds with force and destroys the left, we will see an apocalypse.

2. If the right does get off their duffs and respond with force, we will have a crisis, but not an apocalypse. But any response will have to be strongly anchored at the street level; without a clear popular mandate, it won’t work. Still, folks in or near the Whitehouse will sooner or later have to crush this revolt with full force. I don’t mean a big, bold put down, but a sneaky and dirty, cutthroat campaign that shreds the back room game of the left. When they do this, it will still destroy the system.

America as know it is doomed; there is no going back. I don’t see how Trump’s first term in office can end without that major crisis. Even if the DNC suddenly decides to act sane and play by the same rules as the past, it’s too late. The demons have been set loose. The globalists have too much to lose at this point and delay will destroy their agenda.

Indeed, all the other competing agendas are also too far along to stop now. Quite a few other countries are at their own internal breaking points and civil war must happen. And I still predict #2 above is our fate in the US. So it’s my contention that we should keep our eyes open for signs of this to start. In places where the left is most free to operate is where things will be at their worst. Bloodshed and destruction is unavoidable.

Fear not; our God is in control. Each of you, dear Readers, has a mission in this mess — wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Off the Cuff 04

Mystical Evangelism

Posted on May 16, 2017 by ehurst

A critical element in building a covenant community is ditching the goal-oriented thinking.

Thinking in terms of a concrete goal and efficiency is what turned mainstream Christian religion into a huge conversion machine. Mainstream evangelism is little more than manipulation; it’s designed to persuade your mind to make a decision. It’s just a sales pitch. And we have millions of folks who think they are going to Heaven when they die, but that may not happen.

Going to Heaven is not a matter of changing your mind. I’ve said this before: It rests entirely on God’s initiative. He promised that it would never make sense to us, but that He was quite willing to explain what went along with it. In other words, the business of going to Heaven is wholly inexplicable, but living by His divine moral character is well within reach.

A covenant community means an inexplicable communion with Creation around us because we realize that we become a part of it. It’s joy unspeakable and full of glory, because we have moved the center of our awareness from our heads and into our hearts. Instead of reasoning our way through things, we wait first until our convictions speak of what God really wants, and then we use our reason to make it happen as best we know.

A covenant community is people who, when they walk out the door, the birds and flowers and trees — the wind itself — sings with their own hearts about the glories of God. We enjoy this world because we know it as a friend. Even our bodies talk to us in new ways because it’s all part of the same Creation. And we find this communion so lovely that we long to share it with other people if they will only choose to discover it. But the only way they can choose it is to first see it in us. It has to be consistent in all of us together; it has to be a recognizable characteristic that we all share.

A covenant community means we all agree together voluntarily to use Biblical Law as our guide, to help our minds grasp what to expect from the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It means learning to become a mystic, someone who doesn’t trust reason to establish policy, but to obey the revealed guidelines hinted at in the Law Covenants. We embrace the covenant as a living thing in itself, far more than mere law, yet clearly tied to Law as the expression of God’s character. We seek to be His children, naturally doing our best to live out the implications of what it means to be family.

People don’t join our religion; they share with us the joy of being family. Something inside of them aches longingly to be a part of what we have. We cannot awaken it any other way but to demonstrate. They have to see the power by which Creation itself bends to join in our drive to Christ’s glory.

It’s not a goal; it’s a song we sing daily until He calls us home.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Mystical Evangelism

Linux versus WannaCrypt

Posted on May 15, 2017 by ehurst

You don’t have to read this, but I do have to write it.

Some of you, dear Readers, are sympathetic to my ranting about the virtues of switching from Windows to Linux. The recent big wave of ransom-ware commonly known as “WannaCrypt” (AKA WannaCry) has raised the consciousness of the very real danger of the near monopoly of Microsoft.

Basic truth: With Microsoft, the user is the product. Users are captivated and delivered over for all kinds of exploitation, both by Microsoft and their partners.

The basic problem is that Microsoft won’t give the customer what they want. It’s not profitable. There’s a certain degree of appearing to serve the user, but a big part of that is convincing the user they have been served by manipulating the market and the user. It’s not a question of whether Windows works well enough; it works too well. That is, what Microsoft has done to improve Windows just enough to make the users willing to keep using has seen people resisting upgrades to the next version. Once people got used to the new technology, MS could have stopped changing the user experience a long time ago. But as the technology advanced, there was a great deal of change to Windows that was not driven by demand, but by commercial necessity. That is, MS realized how profitable it was to assert more control over user choice. Once everyone was using Windows, they had a captive audience that could be herded into just about any pen they could build.

In terms of consumer demand, MS could have stopped with XP. The problem for MS was that XP was no longer profitable enough. You cannot pin this down to merely one single driving factor in the market. Simplistic microeconomics will not explain manipulation on that scale. There is this huge wad of propaganda lies about security and new-n-better technology, but so far as consumers actually experienced it, XP was fine, and could be for a long time to come.

No, I’m not promoting resurrecting that pile of steaming crap for an OS. I’m just noting how the user experienced it. Consumers tend to operate as if nothing significant will change during their lives. But MS wasn’t moved so much by the security problems, because the have yet to fix the underlying security design flaws in any of their most recent versions; it’s still Windows. Rather, MS is using the security issues as an excuse for seizing more and more control from the user. Look up “Windows 10 S” and try to understand how this closed, walled garden approach where you can’t install third party software is exactly where it’s all headed. (It’s somewhat like Google’s Chromebooks.)

The great thing about Linux (and other Open Source software) is that users have total control. There’s no profit motive involved in the design. Until recently, the greatest weakness of Linux was the dire necessity of users having to take control to a degree they didn’t want. I would say only in the last few years have we seen the rise of Linux projects that understand users don’t want that much control right up front. There has been a long existing need for a Linux that had sane defaults — sane not for geeks, but the vast horde of users who will never be geeks. (Genuine computer geeks are culturally somewhat hostile to ordinary users, but things have changed just a little here and there.)

So what’s holding us back? Public consciousness.

You aren’t going to get there by simple advertising. That would help, but I don’t see any global ad campaigns promoting Linux in ways users might actually pay attention. That requires way too much money. Nor would a change likely come with the continued ratcheting of torture and abuse from Microsoft; all Big Tech doing the same thing. What it requires is one recognizable voice of authority to tell folks it’s a good idea to migrate. And what would it take to see that happen? What kind of thing would cause a major figure to stand up and say that you should no longer trust Microsoft?

This puts us right back into politics. On some level, there will have to be some sense of betrayal, something that paints a target on Microsoft. It need not be an act of betrayal, only the sense of betrayal. It has to fail in ways where everyone — the media in particular — decide it’s no longer possible to stick with the default. Just a few companies here and there, even really big ones, won’t do it. Money and technology aren’t the issue. It has to be a political issue, because what keeps MS on top is sheer politics — not economics, not the market, not technology, or anything else.

For example: Would you believe that, despite my comments above, I still keep an instance of XP running in a virtual machine on my Linux desktop? It’s because the software environment has favored Windows and Microsoft for so long that a lot of development effort was captivated to it. So there remains an XP-oriented package or two that I need in order to do what I do on a computer. Indeed, I sit here writing this in Notepad++ text editor running via WINE because the folks who make this editor aren’t really that interested in giving us a version for Linux (so far). For my uses, it outshines everything available on Linux. That’s in part because every Linux editor is designed by and for serious computer nerds, not writers. It’s a matter of nerd politics. Match the features and how it works, and I’ll switch.

I suppose if the world of Windows computers were to simply grind to a stop and there was no possible fix to bring them back to life, we might see a migration without any further political propaganda. That’s just barely possible, but that kind of Doomsday scenario is highly improbable.

If you as an individual user feel moved internally to try it, let me recommend Linux Mint with XFCE. If it’s more for corporate of business use, let’s talk about Xubuntu; pick the LTS version. I’ll be here to hold your hand if you need it. Just my two cents.

Posted in computers | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Linux versus WannaCrypt

Admin: Giving Kiln blog a Rest

Posted on May 15, 2017 by ehurst

It seemed like such a good idea at the time. I suppose it has brought some blessings, but it’s not the thing itself. That other blog I maintain no longer serves a genuine purpose (update: it’s permanently gone). On top of that, it has become a burden of care that is increasingly hard to justify. What you may not know is that it has just about filled up the space I have on that server and it’s not even that old. Sure, the guy I’m leasing from isn’t going to worry too much about the space usage, but I sense there’s something afoot without being able to see it directly. He has less time to give it, too, as he pursues his own divine calling.

I still have the full archive of posts, so nothing will be lost. That’s how I do things; virtually all of my blog posts are composed offline and then copied over. I keep the original somewhere in my files. I’ve lost some of that on this blog due to hardware failures in the past, but I’ve changed my habits since then and keep backups, and that was before I started that other blog.

At any rate, I’m going to give it a rest. You should probably read this as God preparing us all for more changes.

Update: That blog is now closed. All the content has been merged with this blog.

Posted in meta | Tagged , | Comments Off on Admin: Giving Kiln blog a Rest

Contextual Law and Divorce

Posted on May 15, 2017 by ehurst

We struggle against a vast ocean of cultural bias against revelation.

For example: Do you understand that communion and spiritual unity demands individuality? If you are not reaching for the fullness of your heritage in Christ as a unique individual member of His Kingdom, you cannot stand in full communion with your brothers and sisters. We struggle against a cultural bias in favor of uniformity. It is so deeply burned into our thinking that it seems only logical. But only when you have truly delved into your own self nature as a child of God can you recognize what is justly and rightly sacrificed for cooperation in the household of faith.

So here’s this issue that keeps coming up in legalistic lecturing from the mainstream: divorce. Folks, this is not a simple matter of keeping this one law. If you don’t keep the whole Law of God, you cannot claim any part of it. So folks who rail against divorce while permitting high school kids to sleep in the same building in summer camp, or swim nearly naked together, are engaged in blasphemy. You can’t pick and choose which part of the Covenant you want to implement.

The primary reason for failed marriages is a completely failed foundation for getting married. Without a covenant community, you cannot expect marriage to succeed. We have cast our married couples out onto the storm to stand on their own while wearing heavy chains of regulation. The vast majority of religious talk about divorce among evangelicals is about rules for the couple, but nobody talks about the rules for the community that is supposed to be involved in their lives.

Once more: Biblical Law is not about restrictions. It’s about receiving from God the blessings of a stable social structure wherein we can build the bonfire of God’s glory. Those blessings require the whole context of the covenant, a context more binding on the community than on the individual.

Read that again: The context of covenant is more binding on the whole than any individual member. That sounds radical in Western ears because Western minds are inherently hostile to revelation. When divorce happens in a covenant community, it’s a bigger disaster for the community as a whole — weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth — than it is for the couple who separate. Cry out because your community has lost a major element of God’s favor and stop harassing the two who felt compelled to divorce.

A proper marriage rests on the power of the moral context that only a strong covenant community can offer. Granted, most couples today are likely entering a covenant community after the fact. We should hardly be surprised when, in the course of developing a proper moral orientation, some of those marriages dissolve. What the Devil hath joined together should separate. Only the two folks in that marriage have the divine right to decide whether God is for against continued marriage. A state-sponsored marriage contract does not bind the hands of our Creator. God alone knows whether they should or shouldn’t; we don’t beat people over the head with a shitty legalism that was never justified under any covenant.

Most of that faux reverence for marriage is nothing more than false worship of the state. Our Western heritage reduces everyone to mere property of the state, but the only consideration at all from the state is economics. It’s pure devotion to Mammon; it’s all about control for the sake of monetary accounting. It’s as if you owe your body to the state, including all future productivity, and the only issue with marriage is how it affects the tax revenues. When you boil it down, the issue of a marriage contract is just that. Nobody in government gives a damn about your covenant blessings.

Yes, some individuals manage to stumble into real faith without a covenant community. God bless those folks; make them your leaders. But those folks are frankly anomalies; they do not represent the common experience. Nor are they any kind of ideal or standard. Those folks simply exist as a gift from God to the community of faith. It’s not that the rest of the folks are of a lower standard or lower quality; every one of them has the capacity for a rare and beautiful faith within their own calling. Good spiritual leaders will tell you that.

Let’s fight legalism as the worst part of our so-called “Western heritage.”

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Contextual Law and Divorce

Origins Agnosticism

Posted on May 14, 2017 by ehurst

Just as a follow-up to my post about crazy things mainstream religious leaders assert about Bible History, I wanted to remind folks of a fundamental philosophical issue. I take an agnostic position about questions of human origins. This business of “Creationism” assumes too much that the Bible itself denies.

Keep in mind that the entire Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) background is first and foremost mystical in assumptions. That means you don’t trust your intellect to accomplish much that matters. You don’t trust your human reasoning and senses to come to a useful conclusion on really important issues. That’s not why God gave us our intellects. Their only purpose is to organize and implement the moral directions coming for a higher faculty. These ANE people assumed a heart-led consciousness and spoke often of how the heart knew better than the mind about moral questions. (Keep in mind that English translations of the Bible too frequently render Hebrew words as “heart” when something else was intended.) ANE writing is loaded with very serious references to the heart as the crown of moral decisions, the highest faculty of human awareness.

And ANE people would never countenance the way Hebrew scripture is analyzed to find detailed descriptions of human origins. They would have called you a fool to your face for trying it. Chasing that kind of analysis is what you might expect from smart-ass teenagers, not serious scholars of the Word.

Consider this: Several of us noticed that reality had shifted sometime in the last year or so. It wasn’t just me; other people said it in other ways. It wasn’t something we sensed with our intellects, but in our hearts. We are still seeing the results, but we agree independently that God is doing something that will change the course of human events. It represents a shift away from a previous path. God has done that more than once; Scripture indicates it happened several times in Bible History. There were major events that completely broke away from the previous path. Given that God works that way, how can you presume to extrapolate backward from current processes to what happened in the past? How can you expect to discern how we got here with any kind of precision? If God is seen as active in human affairs and paying attention, making adjustments to suit His inscrutable purposes, and allowing some of us to catch glimpses of it, how can anyone presume to read the current context back into the historical record?

God is not bound by our academic assumptions about the way things work in this world. All the more so when you consider that He revealed Himself in a cultural and intellectual climate radically different from ours today. Think about two specific events in the Bible: the Flood and the Tower of Babel. Neither of them is described, they are characterized by symbolic references. But the characterization hits us between the eyes with one important point: These were catastrophic changes in human affairs, bringing incalculable changes from what came before. How earth-shattering does it have to be for you to realize that God can do whatever suits His whims, and He doesn’t have to explain Himself. Nor does He have to give us a single clue. He can easily shift the entire archaeological record. The world today is filled with all sorts of inexplicable evidence of things the Bible never mentions, primarily because these other events have no effect on God’s primary purpose in revelation.

And His purpose in revelation is not to account for everything He’s done or that men have done. If you could go back and ask the ancient scholars, they would tell you that what happened in the primordial past may have little or nothing to do with what’s going on right now. If God’s purpose includes humbling us in repentance, then we should expect to find a lot of inexplicable stuff in our world. You should expect that what you see makes no sense in light of what’s going on right now. You should expect Him to confuse things on purpose, and that there is no possible explanation. Indeed, God could have drawn out those Nazca Lines in Peru by His own hand just to make you ask questions. Or maybe He wiped out those people in the Flood because He didn’t want us to poke around in that nasty stuff humans were doing before Noah built the Ark.

Stop assuming God has to make sense on a human level. All the more so when it comes to questions of human origins, don’t assume we have to find some answer in the Bible. Given what we know of how folks thought and wrote back in Moses’ day, we should expect the narrative of Eden to indicate a place not even on this earth. The Fall was by far the most momentous change in human existence ever. The Eden narrative itself is a warning that we cannot hope to grasp it with our intellects.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Origins Agnosticism

Psalm 131

Posted on May 13, 2017 by ehurst

This is specifically attributed to King David. It’s a beautiful portrait of someone who has learned the hard way to dismiss ambition and pride.

David begins confessing what a might work God has done in his heart. He does not bristle at the idea of having to deal with ordinary people and mundane tasks. There is no one beneath his dignity to offer standard human courtesies. His head is not lost in great and burdensome cares of his throne. He remembers being just a shepherd boy.

Let’s not get lost on the question of weening. For all we can tell, Hebrew children were given much latitude to ween themselves when they felt ready. It has as much to do with a sense of security as physical health. The point here is that David no longer feels pulled by the insecurity of a man seeking to feed his ego. He’s ready to face the real world and doesn’t take himself too seriously.

This is what’s behind the very common message: Put your trust in God. Here is the king warning people not to put him on a pedestal. He would still be a shepherd boy were it not for God. And it was a shepherd boy the Lord wanted, so something in that role carries over to his reign as king. It was a shepherd boy’s faith that made ruling possible.

Posted in bible | Tagged , | Comments Off on Psalm 131

Sometimes I Wonder

Posted on May 13, 2017 by ehurst

Sometimes I wonder if some noise made by big names in Christian religion doesn’t represent controlled opposition.

Let’s back up and look at the wider context. I may be crazy, but I’m consistent with the logic I promote. I’ve warned that much of what we associate with mainstream Western Christian religion is the result of successful efforts from the Judaizers to side-track early New Testament faith. The Judaizers were more than just part of some effort to force Gentile Christians to convert to Judaism first before claiming Christ. The whole idea was to subvert the call of Jesus to return to the ancient Hebrew mysticism. The Jewish establishment of His day was Hellenized; it rested on a legalism that took the ancient Hebrew mystical literature and applied rational Aristotelian analysis to it.

The conflict between the ancient Hebrew mysticism and the relatively “new” Hellenizing legalism was highlighted by Jesus’ use of parables. When asked about it, Jesus said, in so many words, that dragging mystical indicative language through the mud of concrete linguistic analysis buried the message. The only way to convey divine spiritual truth to anyone in any language was to use the symbolism of parables. It required a heart-led awareness to absorb the moral nature of revelation. Thus, He used parables to highlight the divide between those who allowed their brains to rule versus those who relied a higher faculty than the mind. The Spirit of God speaks to the heart, not the intellect. The brain must yield to the superior awareness of the heart. His use of parables forced the issue.

So when you read the Bible, you have to be aware that some portions of that material is parabolic. It comes to us clothed in well-established Hebrew symbols and requires an active leadership of the convictions in the heart to make any use of it. The Hellenizing influence that followed in the wake Alexander the Great passing through Palestine on his way to Egypt (roughly 323 BC) perverted the ancient Hebrew approach. The majority of rabbinical schools at that time began slowly drifting into the Aristotelian analysis and gave birth to the linguist legalism that grew like a cancer, giving birth to the Judaism of Jesus’ day. It’s the religion of the Pharisees, the people whom Jesus’ said got almost everything wrong. They knew the words but missed the message. Jesus was calling His nation back to the ancient Hebrew mysticism.

After the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit was given by God to assist believers in the process of restoring the dominion of the heart over the head. People had a direct internal witness from the risen Christ to confirm through convictions what the mind should make of revelation. It still requires faith, but it works better than it did for the ancient Hebrew scholars who had to work pretty hard to gain that level of instinctive insight. In Christ, we start out with the insight, and have to train the mind to obey the Spirit. The danger is the lure of reason’s arrogance in assuming it can handle everything without the heart. The brain has been trained by society to treat moral conviction as mere sentiment. Once we restore the divine order internally, the drive to understand and act on God’s Word is overpowering. God backs up His Word and the blessings flow like a flood.

When the Jewish leaders saw this thing taking off and spreading across the world, they felt threatened. It was their stuff properly understood and made them look stupid. God had given their ancient mission to another people and it was an insult to their pride. But being so completely morally blind, they were convinced it was the Devil doing this and they had to reassert the position of their “god.” They had deified their legalistic understanding of God. So instead of fighting Christianity head-on, they slipped into churches pretending to be just another Judean convert to Christ. They understood the nature of the conflict and sought to push discussions in church meetings using some of the unwritten mysteries of Hebrew oral lore. They knew there was a fascination for that stuff; it was an open door for deception. It was all a very intentional scheme of perverting the gospel by suckering people the same way the rabbis were suckered by Hellenism — it’s the thrill of the intellect seizing power.

John saw it coming and wrote his Revelation in a fashion that requires using that parabolic perception, reasserting Old Testament Hebrew symbolism. But the Judaizers perverted John’s writing to make it support their faux mystical legalism. It’s hard to explain why God allowed this to happen. The message was never completely lost, but it was hidden for a very long time. That was part of John’s warning with the image of the Beast and the Harlot Church. What we do see with clarity is how effectively the Judaizers seduced the organized churches to follow them into the error of the intellect over the heart. By 200 AD it was already quite apparent, and another century saw the Harlot Church compromise with the Beast under Constantine. The government and church together made heart-led faith technically illegal. It was like that until the secularized Enlightenment institutionalized the Secular State. Even now, the Harlot courts the favor the Beast in many ways.

So now we see mainstream Western Christianity under the spell of Enlightenment intellectual assumptions. All these frantic attempts to make Christian religion compatible and acceptable to mainstream society has brought about some truly magnificent folly. For example, it’s not enough that we have a dominant mainstream that insists we must take the Bible literally in every statement, as if the legalistic linguistic analysis is what God intended, but we see desperate efforts to pile up “scientific” evidence to support that childish interpretation of the Bible. These leaders say some of the most outlandish things with a straight face. Because some of it is patently false on the face of it, you have to wonder: Who is sponsoring these people to make such a mockery of the gospel? The whole effect undercuts the otherworldly nature of Christ’s message, which is bad enough, but then it presents the impossible as mandatory. “You aren’t a real Christian if you don’t defend this nonsense.”

Examples of some outrageous claims: The Tower of Babel was during the time of Hammurabi (after Abraham). God made Eden and Adam in 4004 BC. The Garden of Eden is still somewhere on this earth, though it may be dead now. The Flood of Noah didn’t change earth’s topography significantly, so we should have no trouble identifying pre-Flood biblical landmarks. And the biggest lie of all is that modern Israel is somehow the fulfillment of prophecy.

Maybe that should serve as a hint was to where these people get their support. Do you suppose the Judaizers never really went away? With all the silly noise going on, who can hear the call of Christ?

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Moral Complexities

Posted on May 12, 2017 by ehurst

It is a real challenge to stick to a heart-led conviction and wade through the mass of lies. For those of us still learning how to live by divine conviction, seeking to shake off generations of false religious teaching with false moral values, we need a lot of time in prayer and contemplation to catch up. I encourage you to get close to Creation and learn to hear the voice of God in communion with unfallen nature. Learn to pray and worship outdoors in relatively wild settings; get used to just sitting and absorbing that personal moral truth of God’s character. It’s not so much a matter of pristine untouched wilderness — though that is good if you can find it — but a place where the normal noise of human traffic is far enough away that you can hear the sound of nature singing the praises of God.

And then, I encourage you to keep that thrumming song of glory alive when your human responsibilities pull you away from those moments. Stay heart-led; keep an ear on your convictions. This is how we overcome our own sinful tendencies. This is how we restore justice to as much dominion as God grants us individually.

This way, you’ll be in a position to understand when I tell you that a critical element in divine justice is living in that tribal social structure. While it may mean blood kinship, the real point is covenant kinship. That business of shared covenant is the core of divine justice in this fallen world. This is why I characterize shalom as “social stability” — you cannot possibly have genuine social stability any other way than to elevate the covenant to the status of divine law in your thinking.

Of course, we never lose sight of the vast difference between our world of divine justice versus the world around us. Our lives are characterized by the eternal conflict between what is versus what ought to be. We do not control the outcomes; we can just barely control the process within ourselves. Adam — symbolizing our fallen nature — is like a zombie that won’t stay dead, won’t stay nailed to the Cross (Galatians 2:20). We should hardly be surprised that the world around us lives like moral zombies.

I don’t expect the world to understand this kind of talk. It’s not just the way I use language, but the whole thing rests on a moral awareness that only God can give. Instead, I have to speak to the world just a few things that represent their best interests in terms they could understand if they wanted. Instead of talking about the tribal covenant orientation, I refer to nationalism. Whatever bad things might come with that, it’s far better than what comes with other political agendas. If I can persuade men to embrace a nationalist agenda, it’s about as close as they’ll get to social stability and God’s divine blessings.

We are not going to escape death in this world. It’s not what God intended for us, but now it’s the only way out of this mess. But as noted in my previous reference to Galatians 2:20, we can choose death before we actually die. We can sacrifice our sinful nature and God will grant us a trans-dimensional awareness that means we get some kind of taste of the Tree of Life. We face the Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden and use it on ourselves; it accomplishes the same moral purpose that way. So we become aware of things we can’t really expect to experience in our fallen existence. We see not just the conflict, but the full meaning of the conflict. We can discern the nature of things and characterize for others a vision, a path that leads them somewhat closer to that Flaming Sword. We tell them to embrace nationalism and already know that it means people have to bleed and die. We understand that the Canaanites had to be slaughtered or God could not bless Israel in the Conquest.

A lot of Israeli warriors didn’t quite have that deep moral vision of the Covenant, but they did have a certain useful bloodlust. Humans have a capacity for violence and it’s just plain goofy to suggest that violence is inherently sinful. It has its place in the fallen world. Don’t try to overly analyze this with your reasoning; God commanded His people to destroy and kill because it was part of His inscrutable plans. The problem was that Israel got lazy about it; it’s the sin of Adam in eating the Forbidden Fruit. Fighting moral evil is a dirty job and Adam had competing interests to distract him. He should have attacked the Devil. And Israel failed to bring God’s wrath against the Canaanites in full measure. That violent human tendency does have a godly purpose, but it requires some strong preparation to see what’s the real threat that needs killing instead of seeking fleshly convenience.

Don’t ask me why God would desire whole portions of humanity to die in their sins. This the world in which we live. It’s sad to see so much potential lost that way, but the real problem is our moral blindness. Our intellect is arrogant and imagines it could find a way to redeem those folks and make them more useful. As if we could succeed where God has closed the door…

We aren’t living in a society that embraces the Covenant of Noah, and I’m not appointed by God to take political leadership. I’m not going to tell you whom you should go and kill with any kind of moral authority from God. Rather, I’ll tell you that the question of using violence is valid under Biblical Law; it’s a valid question for those who follow Christ. But you have to get with God and know for yourself what He wants. We don’t listen to the shrill false morality of our society because it stands on a false moral approach to everything. It flies in the face of God and His revelation; it makes the State your god and demands you do violence only at government behest. Some of you reading this will, in the near future, be confronted with moments when violence is God’s will for you, never mind what government says. I’m utterly convinced I will face those moments. God can redeem our bloodlust, too.

For the rest of humanity in our current American political context, I would say that violence against the likes of the Antifas is justified. But I would also say don’t get lost in that. You may need to save some for the real threat: the globalists behind the Antifas. Do you honestly imagine those folks will peacefully surrender their political power? They are the ones funding the Antifas. Sure, wait for them to force your hand — they will. They most certainly would not hesitate to kill you as a simple matter of convenience.

Would you rather we just keep going in the same muddled direction where the plutocrats plunder everyone of everything? How bad does it have to hurt before you act? If you want to stop the oppression, the path is to take down the globalists first, then the imperialists — the former is shielding the latter. As the linked article notes, there will come a time when the imperialists will send out fake Antifas to keep you distracted from attacking the imperialist agenda. So while you have a little fun punching out the Antifas, don’t get confused about the real threat.

In the end, the thing you imagine you are protecting or recovering will lie shattered on the ground. In the back of your minds, realize that the system as come to an end already, and it’s time for you to build something new once you have broken the plutocrat power over you.

Europeans: I can’t help you much. The globalists own you already; God has delivered your countries into their hands. Your lands are already swamped with implacable foes and your future is lost. The Islamic conquest fended off in 732 at the Battle of Tours has now been embraced by your political elite. You folks will have to find your own answers. The tide cannot be turned back now. You’ll need to learn violence merely to survive on a daily level. God help you.

For those of us who walk the heart-led way, don’t get trapped in political concerns. Learn to recognize what’s happening and be ready to exploit the opportunities for Christ’s glory.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Moral Complexities